The UK Is Poorer Than Mississippi

As we say in Mississippi,
“Bless Your Heart.”

Or as you say in the UK,
“As-Salamu Alaykum.” https://t.co/oCajoT8LQ7

— Governor Tate Reeves (@tatereeves) April 16, 2026

There's been yet another set of stories over the past few days saying that if the UK were the 51st state, it would be the poorest, below even Mississippi:

When Brits are asked how wealthy the United Kingdom is compared with the United States, most believe the country still ranks near the top. In reality, the U.K. is poorer than every single U.S. state—something that comes as a shock to many when they learn the truth.

That disconnect is laid bare in a new report by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), which finds that Britons significantly overestimate the U.K.’s economic standing both globally and relative to the United States.

But this headline is actually evergreen. A quick web search brings up:

Mar 31, 2025 Britain—Like France and Spain—Is Poorer than Mississippi
Aug 10, 2023 Is Britain Really as Poor as Mississippi?
Mar 7, 2016 It Is Still True That Even Mississippi Is Richer Than Britain
Aug 25, 2014 Britain Is Poorer Than Any US State: Yes, Even Mississippi

This shouldn't be a surprise. Last month, I looked at the origins of the UK's open-borders immigration policy, and I found that it can be traced to a post-World War II "labor shortage", whereby immigration from the UK's Caribbean territories was encouraged to fill jobs, or viewed a little differently, to keep wages down. But UK attitudes date back farther than that:

A general strike took place in the United Kingdom from 4 to 12 May 1926. It was called by the General Council of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in an unsuccessful attempt to force the British government to act to prevent wage reductions and worsening conditions for 1.2 million locked-out coal miners. Some 1.7 million workers went out, especially in transport and heavy industry.

. . . In 1924, the Dawes Plan was implemented. It allowed Germany to re-enter the international coal market by exporting "free coal" to France and Italy, as part of their reparations for the war. This extra supply reduced coal prices. In 1925, Winston Churchill, the chancellor of the Exchequer, reintroduced the gold standard. This made the British pound too strong for effective exporting to take place from Britain. Furthermore, because of the economic processes involved in maintaining a strong currency, interest rates were raised, which hurt some businesses.

Mine owners wanted to maintain profits even during times of economic instability, which often took the form of wage reductions for miners in their employment. Miners' weekly pay had been lowered from £6 to £3 18s. over seven years. Coupled with the prospect of longer working hours for miners, the industry was thrown into disarray.

The Dawes Plan, named for US banker and vice president during Coolidge's second term Charles G Dawes, was developed as a way to resolve the economic and political problems resulting from the reparations payments imposed on Germany in the Versailles Treaty, itself a consequence of UK policy miscalculation. In turn, however, the UK economy depended on continued reparations payments, which were intended to repay the loans the UK owed for financing its role in World War I -- but the return to the gold standard put new stresses on the economy.

In tbhe US, the Federal Reserve acted to support the UK's return to the gold standard. This led to

the Fed's decision to raise interest rates in 1928 and 1929. The Fed did this in an attempt to limit speculation in securities markets. This action slowed economic activity in the United States. Because the international gold standard linked interest rates and monetary policies among participating nations, the Fed's actions triggered recessions in nations around the globe. The Fed repeated this mistake when responding to the international financial crisis in the fall of 1931.

This was a result of yet another UK policy miscalculation that primarily hurt the working class. The 1926 General Strike appears to have solidified bourgeois attitudes against the workers:

[A]s with most strikes, the general public' hostility to being inconvenienced outweighed much of the sympathy they might have felt for the miners' plight. Most people tended to fear rather than applaud the sympathetic relationship among the labour unions, for a general strike (by the end of the stoppage, labour leaders were also using this term), carried to its logical extreme was and is a workers' revolution.

. . . Upper and upper-middleclass university students, society women, titled people, and young businessmen drove trains and buses, ran canteens, printed and delivered emergency newspapers, worked in the docks, and had a great time "carrying on".

. . . The very condensation of the volunteers' role into an upper-class masculine image was what has enabled it to be so easily invoked as a symbol of eccentric Britishness, of good humour in a crisis, of the gentleman amateur par excellence. That image represented the continuity of a nineteenth-century paradigm that categorized life as a sporting competition not to be taken too seriously and English lads of a certain class as the ones capable of winning it - and showing others how to play the game.

The brevity of the actual strike also contributed to its success as a social paradigm. Chrome AI notes,

Many volunteers lacked the technical skills for the jobs they replaced. For example, rail services were shambolic and often operated at only 1% of normal capacity, leading to months of equipment repairs afterward.

But this was lost in the general celebratory air of bourgeois self-congratulation. In other words, the UK seems to be a special case, in which 19th-century paradigms of the working class vis-a-vis the bourgeoisie have persisted into the 21st, allowing long-entrenched policy miscalculations to persist and keeping the country poor.